Considering that Democrats last November won their most sweeping electoral victory since 1964, and now enjoy unified control of government for the first time since 1994, the organized Left doesn't seem very happy these days. Some of that discontent reflects the difficulty of moving from an opposition party that perpetually prizes conflict to a governing party that must compromise to advance an agenda. But it also reflects a potentially destabilizing imbalance between liberal expectations and assets rooted in little-discussed truths about the balance of power within the Democratic coalition.

As Democrats settle in to power, two distinct, and somewhat dissonant, lines of complaint are emerging from leaders on the left. One charges that Obama is deferring too much to Wall Street and its party allies in his response to the financial crisis. In just the past week, New York Times columnist Paul Krugman has written that Obama's financial stabilization plan fills him with "despair"; his colleague, Frank Rich, has suggested that Obama's handling of the AIG bonuses might be his "Katrina moment" and Internet doyenne Arianna Huffington has urged Obama to strip authority for the financial rescue from Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. That's insufficient for liberal columnist and activist David Sirota: he wants Obama to fire Geithner because "he's either lying to the public or totally incompetent."

The left's other complaint is targeted at moderate-to-conservative
Congressional Democrats resisting elements of Obama's agenda. Obama's
budget has provided the initial flashpoint. Several liberal groups have
moved over the past week to heighten pressure on "blue dog" or "New
Democrats" in the House and Senate to back Obama's budget blueprint and
to support him if he tries to use the reconciliation process to force
through his universal health care and climate change initiatives. That
effort includes relatively non-confrontational radio and television ads
from MoveOn.Org and Americans United for Change aimed at Democratic, as
well as Republican, members. The Campaign for America's Future, led by
veteran liberal activists Bob Borosage and Roger Hickey, has taken a
sharper tack with its "Dog the Blue Dogs" campaign; the campaign aims
to mobilize grassroots pressure on center-right Democrats to abandon
what the group has provocatively called "treacherous opposition" to
Obama's budget. . "The more conservative Democrats are posturing
themselves to be the deal breakers and if they want to play that game,
they need to be reminded that people in their states and in their
districts are really hurting," says Hickey.

Looming above all
these individual campaigns is the Accountability Now political action
committee that a coalition of liberal groups and Internet activists
recently formed to fund primary challenges against Congressional
Democrats who, in the group's eyes, "sell out the interests of their
constituents in favor of corporations."

The common thread
linking these complaints are the conviction that the Obama
administration (on finance) and elements of the Democratic
Congressional majority (on the budget and potentially other pieces of
Obama's domestic agenda) are temporizing at a moment they should be
bold. These liberal leaders are frustrated because even at this moment
of unified control, Obama and the Democratic Congress are not embracing
their agenda (nationalization of the banks, unfettered public
investment and social spending) as unreservedly as they hoped (or
expected).

It's easy to imagine that frustration compounding in
the months ahead if Obama and Congressional Democrats pursue a
legislative compromise on health care that jettison's the left's top
priority-a public competitor to the private insurance companies-or if
they accept climate change legislation that makes big concessions to
coal-dependent Midwest states. By that point, today's shrieks might
sound like throat-clearing.

Regardless of the merits of the
left's arguments on each of those individual debates, there's a
structural reason why Obama and Congressional Democrats may not prove
as responsive to their demands as they hope. Liberals aren't as big a
component of the Democratic coalition as many of the Left's leaders
believe. Moderate voters are much more important to Democratic success
than liberal voters. And liberals are also less important to Democrats
than conservatives are to Republicans. That means liberals generally
have less leverage than they recognize in these internal party
arguments-and less leverage than conservatives can exert in internal
struggles over the GOP's direction. "Liberals are less central to the
Democratic coalition than conservatives are to the Republican
coalition," says Andy Kohut, director of the non-partisan Pew Research
Center for the People and the Press.

That contrast is apparent
from two different angles: identification and behavior. In cumulative
Pew data for 2008, Kohut says, only one-third of self-identified
Democrats described themselves as liberals; the rest identified as
moderates or conservatives. For Republicans the proportions were
reversed: two-thirds of Republicans considered themselves
conservatives, while only one-third identified as moderates or
liberals. Gallup's findings are similar: in their cumulative 2008 data,
just 39% of self-identified Democrats described themselves as liberals,
while 70% of Republicans identified as conservatives.

Looking at
Obama's actual vote in 2008 reinforces the story. According to the
Edison/Mitofsky Election Day exit polls, liberals provided only 37% of
Obama's total votes. Moderates (50%) and conservatives (13%) provided
far more. By contrast, conservatives provided almost three-fifths of
John McCain's votes, with moderates contributing only about one-third
and liberals a negligible 5%.

The bottom line is that, compared
to Republicans, Democrats are operating with a much more diverse
electoral coalition-and one in which the party's ideological vanguard
plays a smaller role. That's one reason why in a Pew post-election
survey, nearly three-fifths of Democrats said they wanted the party to
move in a more moderate (rather than liberal) direction, while
three-fifths of Republicans said they wanted the party to move right.
The parties "have a difference in our bases," says Jim Kessler, vice
president of Third Way, a group that works with centrist Democratic
Senators. "Certainly the most loyal part of the Democratic base is
going to be self-identified liberals, but numerically moderates are a
bigger portion of the coalition, so there is going to be some tension."

As
Kessler notes, the Democratic coalition tilts even slightly further
toward moderates in swing states and districts. In the Democrats' North
Carolina and Colorado Senate victories last November self-identified
liberals provided only 31% of the vote for both Kay Hagan and Mark
Udall respectively; in Alaska, liberals provided just 29% of Mark
Begich's votes. That pattern is especially important because Democrats
today hold so many more swing seats in Congress than Republicans: 22 of
the 58 Senate Democrats, for instance, were elected by states that
voted both times for President Bush. (By contrast, just 3 of the 41
Senate Republicans were elected by states that voted both times against
President Bush.)

Kessler believes the left's threat to mount
primaries against centrist Democrats is likely to be "relatively
ineffectual" precisely because the Members who most antagonize liberals
tend to represent places where liberals lack enough leverage to oust
them. Yet Kessler is not entirely unsympathetic to the liberal concern
about the centrists. He argues that after the backlash against Bill
Clinton's chaotic first two years propelled Republicans to control of
Congress in 1994, moderates excessively narrowed their sights. "What
happened in our view was to be moderate became to be small in your
thinking," he says. "I think from 1994 through 2004 the moderate wing
of the party was wandering and was not really about big things." He
believes "a new generation of progressive moderates" like Sen. Claire
McCaskill (D-Mo) or Rep. Artur Davis (D-Ala) is more open to big ideas,
but he says he understands why the party's liberal wing remains to be
convinced. "The new center of the progressive movement, they have some
proving to do," Kessler says. "I think they are up to it, but they have
to prove that they want to pass a large agenda."

Hickey is
making some conciliatory noises too. He says the "treacherous
opposition" accusation against centrist Democrats "was an effective
gimmick to get the attention of the media," but that his group has
"backed off that confrontational rhetoric" because it recognizes that
many "blue dogs are very worried about the economy...and are supporting
the president." By Thursday, the Campaign for America's Future web site
had dropped the prominent references to the "Dog the Blue Dogs"
campaign-though the group is still complaining about
"conservaDems...pushing to cut back needed investments, often to
protect....entrenched corporate interests."

The Democratic
divisions haven't yet approached the magnitude of the splits between
liberals and centrists that contributed to the 1994 debacle. Congressional Democrats have actually held together on early votes under Obama better than they did under Bill Clinton. And Obama,
for all the carping from prominent liberal voices about his financial
stabilization plan, remains wildly popular across the party (Pew
recently placed his approval rating at 93% among liberal Democrats and
86% among moderate and conservative Democrats). Yet it's easy to see
how Democrats could reprise some of their Clinton-era troubles if
liberals operate with unrealistic expectations about their ability to
control the party agenda, or moderates refuse to recognize their common
interest with the Left in passing an ambitious program Democrats can
take to the voters in 2010. Kessler asks the right question: "Is this
going to be two years of a brief what might have been [for Democrats]
or the beginning of a long progressive era? I think the way the
liberals and the centrists in the party relate to each other is going
to go a long way in determining the answer."

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And if thy brother, a Hebrew man, or a Hebrew woman, be sold unto thee, and serve thee six years; then in the seventh year thou shalt let him go free from thee. And when thou sendest him out free from thee, thou shalt not let him go away empty: thou shalt furnish him liberally out of thy flock, and out of thy floor, and out of thy winepress: of that wherewith the LORD thy God hath blessed thee thou shalt give unto him. And thou shalt remember that thou wast a bondman in the land of Egypt, and the LORD thy God redeemed thee: therefore I command thee this thing today.

— Deuteronomy 15: 12–15

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